About

Institute Vision

Digital data has become central to our daily lives, industry and culture. It is key to advances in our understanding of nature and in the quality of human life. Data collection, stewardship and analyses are already integrated into the infrastructure for commerce, healthcare, governance and education. These ubiquitous practical uses of digital data have raised awareness of the need to further develop the underlying scientific and technological basis for understanding and exploiting data. The new science builds upon models and methods in information, statistics and computation, by drawing particular attention to the sources of data and their effect upon the nature and quality of data.

UC San Diego is pursuing a strategy for advancing Data Science that builds upon its unique strengths. In particular, UC San Diego seeks institutional presence—both in the sense that Data Science should be an integral part of our campus and in the sense that UC San Diego should lead the future of this field—that benefits all existing units, departments, programs, schools, and enables them to contribute to the emerging academic discipline.

The mission of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute is to explore the scientific foundations for the new field of data science. These foundations include both the principles, methods, and tools that will enable us to understand the nature of digital data, and also the intersections between this new field and existing disciplines of human enquiry. A key aspect of the Institute’s work will be contributing to the training and education of the next generation of leaders in Data Science.

Catalyzing New Research

The Institute seeks to catalyze new research and create a thriving self-identifying community of data science researchers and practitioners. This community will be organized into research clusters that are designed to bring out synergies rooted in the nature of the problem, methods to solve it, or a shared interest in outcomes. Following Academic Senate approval, the Institute will host the undergraduate program in Data Science and, eventually, create graduate programs in Data Science.

New research will be enabled by providing seed support and mentoring to a number of research projects across the campus that seek to advance methods and tools on demonstration projects where Data Science is having a direct impact. The projects will be sought across the entire campus with a particular focus on demonstrating how Data Science can enable analytic precision through new methods and tools, develop a longitudinal view of the technical problems and assure that it has an impact on the quality of the solutions.

Working together with existing academic units, we hope to catalyze domain experts to take on research that advances Data Science as a field by creating communities where they have a key role in identifying problems, proposing solutions and evaluating outcomes. Physical space, including space for regular seminars of general interest in Data Sciences, as well as experimental infrastructure and infrastructure support, are key parts of this new ecosystem we plan to create under HDSI and make available to the researchers and faculty across the campus.